Category: Health – Happiness

Abortion Might Be a Winning Issue — Even in Florida

Politico

Abortion Might Be a Winning Issue — Even in Florida

Ryan Lizza – April 6, 2024

Chasity Maynard/Tallahassee Democrat via AP

Abortion rights supporters have been on a hot winning streak in state ballot initiatives since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Now here comes Florida.

The Florida Supreme Court issued a pair of decisions earlier this week that upheld a strict abortion ban in the state and also cleared the way for Amendment 4, a November referendum on whether to enshrine the right to abortion in the Florida Constitution.

Anna Hochkammer did much of the heavy lifting to get Amendment 4 on the ballot as executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, but the job is getting only trickier amid the swirl of 2024 politics. Changing the Florida Constitution via referendum requires a 60 percent majority, which means Amendment 4 will need support from a lot of Floridians who would never back Joe Biden.

Still, Hochkammer is optimistic about winning a bipartisan coalition of support after studying the 11 post-Dobbs elections that have centered on abortion rights; she found that a message promoting freedom succeeds.

“Floridians are interested in freedom — personal freedom — and that became one of the North Stars of the entire petition,” she said in this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive.

I sat down with Hochkammer for POLITICO Magazine to discuss the delicate relationship between abortion rights activists and the Biden campaign, why she thinks politicians need to use the “a” word when talking about abortion and whether she would want Donald Trump to endorse Amendment 4 and be an ally for her cause.

This transcript has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Florida’s law on constitutional amendments is that they require 60 percent support. If I’m not mistaken, the abortion issue hasn’t hit 60 percent in any red state so far. How do you get to 60 percent in Florida? 

You get to 60 percent in Florida by being really focused about who you’re talking to, how you’re talking about abortion access and getting people to understand that it’s an issue that transcends politics.

You basically have to give people who are independents and Republicans permission to agree with you on this thing, to disagree with their individual candidate or their party, and to split that ticket if that’s what they feel they need to do. Yes, 60 percent can be an intimidating threshold. Florida has passed referenda at the 60 percent threshold over and over again over the last decade.

The Biden campaign this week argued after the Supreme Court’s decisions that Florida was suddenly “winnable.” You just said that voters need to split the ticket. Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, doesn’t want people to split the ticket. She wants people to support your amendment and vote for Joe Biden. How does that complicate things?

My election is to pass Amendment 4.

I do not live in a hole in the ground. We’re going to be on the November 2024 ballot in Florida, and all sorts of people and candidates in all kinds of races are looking at this as an opportunity for synergy. But I’m not trying to be naive when I say that more people support abortion access than probably support Santa Claus. It would be a crazy thing in 2024 in Florida to not support Amendment 4.

I don’t look at it as threatening. I look at it as smart people who are reading the room and realizing that 75 percent of Floridians reject the six-week abortion ban. I would never look at any candidate who agrees with me on this issue and say, “Please don’t talk about Amendment 4 because you’re running in a partisan race.” I say: “The more the merrier.” Just make the tent as big as possible on this particular issue, and let individual candidates and campaigns find their own way.

Would it help your campaign if Donald Trump came out and supported your amendment? 

I hope everyone who supports our amendment comes out and says so on the record, no matter who they are.

We’re in this situation because the Florida Legislature passed a 15-week ban, and then went back a year later and passed a six-week ban. We are just closing up another session of the Florida Legislature. If they had wanted to take this off the table, they could have simply undone it during the legislative session. In fact, Gov. Ron DeSantis could call a special session tomorrow on this issue, repeal the six-week ban, announce they got it wrong and take it off the table if they wanted to. That’s in their power to do.

It seems to me that it would be good for your campaign if Trump came out in favor of Amendment 4.

I want everybody who supports Amendment 4 to come out and say so — whoever you are, whatever your name, whatever your party affiliation, whatever your religious background, if you support Amendment 4, I would hope that people would have the courage to say so and say so on the record.

I’m trying to tease this out of you because the politics are so tricky. This isn’t an easy one for you, right?

I think the politics are really straightforward on this because I’m lucky enough that I’m working on an issue. I’m not working on a campaign, per se. I’m not working for a political party. It’s one of the reasons why the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition has been doing such good work as part of the coalition to get Amendment 4 on the ballot and to get it to pass is that we are a single-issue PAC. We are a bipartisan PAC. We have advisers on board like our former [state] House Rep. Carlos Lacasa, who’s come out very strongly in favor of Amendment 4. He can make very persuasive political arguments from his perspective as a conservative, Cuban, Catholic Republican, former elected official in Florida about why he thinks Amendment 4 is the right thing to do and why he’s going to be voting for it. And keeping my arms wide open has done nothing except help this initiative.

What is the relationship between voters who are enthusiastic about going to the polls and supporting Amendment 4, but who may not like Joe Biden? What does your polling say about this? Is the Biden campaign’s enthusiasm warranted?

It’s really complicated. I would say that there are some elements of the moment here that are unique to November 2024. So it’s hard to draw conclusions about what Florida voters will do and what the voter universe will do inside the ballot box, because this is the first time that we’ve had the confluence of a statewide referendum on an issue in Florida that has coincided with a statewide or nationwide campaign that has chosen to focus on that exact issue. And I think that is probably the thing that makes this situation so hard to get a handle on.

I think abortion access is the most compelling domestic political issue in America right now. Everyone in America is talking about it. I think that through a bunch of different actions at the local, state and national level, the presidential election has become a proxy election about abortion. That is really the thing that makes it different.

I think you’re going to have candidates, whatever their position on abortion, telling their voters, whether they’re in California, New York state, Texas or Florida, “A vote for your presidential candidate is a vote on access to abortion.” It’s either banning abortion at the state level or wanting abortion access protected at a national level. And that’s a pretty stark political choice to give people at the top of the ticket while simultaneously asking them to vote about an abortion amendment at the bottom.

I don’t know whether the bottom is going to push the top, or the top is going to push the bottom, but I certainly think that more people feel positively about access to abortion than they do about any particular political candidate.


Let’s talk about the amendment language. There’s an art to writing these things.

Here’s the language: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.” How did you come up with those two sentences?

The first thing I have to acknowledge is that a lot of the heavy lifting was done on writing that language by working groups. Most of them were people that were associated with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU or had worked on other statewide referenda at other times in Florida.

Every state is its own universe when it comes to this sort of thing — what’s the law in the state where we are? What’s the process for getting something on the ballot? What’s the process for getting something to amend the constitution? What’s the legal history of the issue in our state?

Then you have to figure out what you want to say, what you want to do. And then you have to poll it. When you have a disagreement between one noun and another noun, one verb and another verb, you really do have to spend the time and money polling these things to see whether moving a comma or changing an adverb changes what voters perceive of this language. And so you really do have a data-informed process.

We didn’t officially launch this petition drive until June 1. And the first half of 2023 was really spent circling the horses, organizing and figuring out what we wanted to do so that we could avoid some of the problems that other referenda have had across the country. We had the great advantage in Florida of being able to learn from other states.

Tell us about that. What did you learn from the other post-Dobbs referenda? 

I looked at that Wisconsin Supreme Court race that got a ton of national attention and a huge amount of money was put into it. That was basically a proxy election about abortion access in Wisconsin. I think anybody who reads that election differently is choosing not to see what’s right in front of them.

So, I went through these 11 different elections that I considered either direct or proxy elections about abortion, and I tried to look for some common themes. I looked at the data — not only in what their polling told them about their messaging and about the voter universe that they expected, but we were lucky enough to be able to do an autopsy afterward.

My hypothesis about Florida is that as much as we like to underscore, you know, #FloridaMan, all the crazy stories out of Florida, Floridians do tend to follow some national trends. We’re not so far off the median American voter’s point of view that that data isn’t useful to us. One thing that became clear from the get-go was Floridians are interested in freedom — personal freedom — and that became one of the North Stars of the entire petition.

The top takeaway from those 11 campaigns is that abortion access is really popular with Americans. A lot of us had been trained in the political world, even in the reproductive rights and human rights world, to kind of dance around the word “abortion.”

Joe Biden recently did that.

Yeah. For a long time in politics, “reproductive health care” and “women’s health care” and “women’s rights” sort of became synonymous with access to abortion. I think the evidence shows, at least in the way that voters behave across America, that “abortion” is not a dirty word. And that holds true everywhere — whether it’s Kentucky, Ohio or California. And that holds true in Florida as well.

The other thing we learned is that people find abortion somewhat ethically fraught. The idea that if you support abortion access, you are hardened to the human stories — to the complicated feelings that people have about abortion — does not bear out. And in fact, I would say most Americans acknowledge that abortion is complicated. Not just medical abortion, but elective abortion. The circumstances around each and every one of these abortions can be something that gives people pause. And interestingly, it seems to me that what we need to do in politics around abortion is lean into that by saying, “It is complicated. It is fraught.”

We’re not having a referendum about pap smears. We’re not having a referendum about breast examinations. Nobody goes to a women’s clinic and says, “I need ‘care.’” You walk in, and you ask for something very specific because you need it — and that’s an abortion. And so we need to be able to say the word, and have conversations with voters assuming that they are functional grown-ups. Because when we do that on this issue, we find that time and time again across America, they vote “yes.”

Did it bother you that Joe Biden didn’t use the word “abortion” in the State of the Union? 

One part of me says, “Yes, I wish he’d used the word ‘abortion’ in the State of the Union.” And the other part of me, the grown-up, who’s not selfish and is able to see the bigger picture, is amazed that about a minute-and-a-half of the State of the Union was about abortion access. Whatever euphemisms he chose to use, he talked about my issue in ways that I have not heard a president talk about abortion, ever.

You know, the president of the United States is saying the issue that’s my No. 1 priority is a No. 1 priority for him. I can’t complain too much about that, frankly, even if it wasn’t exactly the way I would want it to happen.

Let’s go back to the language. Help us understand the two sentences. Why this language?

It’s 49 words. It’s two sentences. It’s plain language. You know, “viability” has been defined under Florida statute since 1979. It’s the Roe standard. So it is the most straightforward way, at least from a Floridian perspective, to talk about abortion access.

And interestingly, it’s also the way that polls the best. People who find themselves in these circumstances with their doctors talk about the issue of viability, which is a very straightforward thing. It’s the point at which you understand that the fetus will survive outside the womb without extraordinary medical intervention. And that is a fungible place. It depends on what’s wrong with the fetus, what’s wrong with a woman, and what sort of medical care is available.

The opponents like to underscore that is a weakness in the issue. I actually think it’s a strength. I think it’s all the more reason why it’s a decision that should be made by a doctor, made by a medical team, made by a patient and her family with their health care provider and not arbitrarily defined somewhere far, far away by people who don’t understand the context of any particular situation or case.

So the first part of the sentence is about viability. And then the second part of the sentence is to protect the patient’s health as determined by a health care provider. 

Correct. And the second sentence is a very straightforward sentence. Under the Florida standard, a constitutional amendment has to be single-subject. There is language in the Florida Constitution that grants the authority to the Legislature to require parental notification before a minor receives abortion services. And so we included that second line to make sure that it was clear to the Florida Supreme Court and to voters that this was a single issue, and it didn’t affect that authority.

Ironically, it also makes it poll better, because it makes it very clear to people that we’re not asking them to throw up their hands and give up any sort of parental oversight over the lives of their children, and people in their families. And it’s a fabulous thing to be able to tell people so clearly what we want for them in such a succinct language.


I want to ask you about the opponents and what they are seizing on in the language. The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops is making two arguments. First, that abortions would be allowed at a point when a fetus can feel pain. And second, that it would legalize full-term abortions. How do you respond to that? 

There’s a lot of misinformation that we’re going to have to make sure that people understand. And once people understand the biology and the sociology behind pregnancy and childbirth, most people end up supporting our amendment. I don’t want to go too far down the gynecological-obstetric route here. But I can say that those are not concerns that we have. We don’t think that there’s science to support those positions.

And then the abortion “up to birth” thing is really just a misrepresentation of exactly what happens during pregnancy and childbirth. Third trimester abortions are just exceedingly rare. They’re well under 1 percent of abortions that are conducted in this country. They are always the result of truly tragic circumstances. So the only response I can have to anybody faced with the issue of a possible third trimester termination is that we all need to mind our businesses and have tremendous compassion for those people because they are dealing with an outrageous human tragedy, and they should have the privacy to do so with their medical team and their family and their faith leader. And I hope it never happens to me or anyone that I love.

Explain the other decision that the Florida Supreme Court issued on Monday, and what that means on a practical level for people in Florida.

So, interestingly, the same day that they published the ruling on our abortion access referendum, the Florida Supreme Court published its ruling on the constitutionality of the 15-week abortion ban that was passed by the Florida Legislature about 18 months ago. It does not include any exceptions for rape or incest. It was challenged immediately on the grounds that it violates the state of Florida’s right to privacy.

Not content with the 15-week abortion ban, the Florida Legislature reconvened for the following session, and passed a six-week abortion ban. Now, a six-week abortion ban is, for all intents and purposes, a total abortion ban. The vast majority of women have no idea that they’re even pregnant at six weeks. And so in the middle of this statewide referendum, we are given the opportunity to paint a pretty clear political picture about what the choice is. The choice is either total abortion ban or access to abortion before viability and when necessary to protect the patient’s health. And I think it’s a winner for us.

It’s a human tragedy. I would imagine over the next eight to 10 months, we’re going to start hearing horror stories like those we’ve been hearing out of Tennessee and out of Texas, where they have similarly banned abortion at these very, very early stages. And you’re going to hear stories of people bleeding out on the bathroom floors. You’re going to hear stories of women having to flee the state in order to get medical care.

I have no particular desire to see the women of Florida suffer from these barbaric circumstances. But I do have to acknowledge that it does help my movement show people in no uncertain terms exactly what the options are in front of them. It is a tremendous political opportunity on top of a horrifying human crisis.

When the six-week ban kicks in, what will the availability of medical abortions be in Florida?

That’s still very to-be-determined. Of course, we have this entire group out there now that wants to revive the Comstock Act back from 1873 and make the mailing of anything it considers “pornographic” — which, traditionally, includes birth control — illegal. The six-week abortion ban contains language in it that is somewhat vague, but does make anybody who facilitates an abortion an accessory to a crime.

So the question then becomes, who’s facilitating? How are they facilitating? What counts as facilitating? One of the consistent strategies that I’m seeing come out of this very extreme Florida branch of politics is writing these laws in ways that are quite broad and quite vague in order to intimidate people into not acting. Of course health care providers don’t want to be arrested for serving their patients; husbands don’t want to be arrested for driving their wives to a clinic or to a doctor’s appointment; and anybody who really cares about not ending up inside a courtroom and being accused of a terrible crime while providing healthcare to somebody is, I think, necessarily going to be stumped here. They want to make it as confusing, as frightening and as intimidating as possible.

I think it’s entirely likely that we’re going to see people arrested, we’re going to see people accused of and defending themselves for simply helping their family members.

Among all the possible arguments for Biden, Democrats only need to make one

CNN Opinion:

Among all the possible arguments for Biden, Democrats only need to make one

Opinion by Ana Marie Cox – April 5, 2024

Florida Supreme Court votes on abortion restrictions

Editor’s Note: Ana Marie Cox is a political journalist and writer in Austin. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

To win in November, President Joe Biden and other Democrats must seize upon and never let up on abortion rights as their most important policy focus. Democrats’ historical reticence to give a full-throated and explicit defense of abortion rights or to take advantage of congressional majorities to enshrine those rights into law kept the door open for Republicans to find a way to overturn Roe v Wade. The painful irony is that because of this policy mismanagement, Democrats have transmuted the hardship and suffering of hundreds of thousands of would-be abortion-seekers into a wave of ballot-box endorsements for reproductive choice. And in no place is this alchemy more vital to Biden’s chances of sealing a second term than in the Sunshine State.

Ana Marie Cox - <em>Faith Fonseca</em>
Ana Marie Cox – Faith Fonseca

This week, the Supreme Court of Florida ruled to both allow the state’s six-week abortion ban to stand and to allow a state-wide vote in November to enshrine abortion as a right protected by the state’s constitution. These decisions put a spotlight on the nexus of real policy outcomes and political theatrics underpinning the 2024 contest.

The theatrics have played out with once-ardent anti-abortion Republican politicians suddenly forced to reckon with the overwhelmingly unpopular outcomes that recognizing “fetal personhood” — an official GOP position for decades — creates. In the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court decision applying the logic of personhood to in vitro fertilization, the state legislature immediately passed legislation to protect the IVF process that relies on embryos. But that wasn’t enough to keep an Alabama IVF clinic from announcing that it was discontinuing the procedure.

Former President Donald Trump, canny as always about polling, continues to try to thread an unsteady needle and is once again trying to postpone his day of reckoning by saying that he’s going to be making a statement about abortion next week after being pushed to respond to Florida’s six-week ban. His campaign adviser Brian Hughes said Trump endorses “preserving life” but carefully avoided, for now, a position on the ballot measure or six-week policy itself. As Hughes put it: “He supports states’ rights because he supports the voters’ right to make decisions for themselves.” The statement ended with the only rhetorical gambit left to Republicans, the same lie about the Democratic position that the GOP has used for decades: “Where President Trump thinks voters should have the last word, Biden and many Democrats want to allow abortion up until the moment of birth and force taxpayers to pay for it,” another spokesperson said.

It would be more accurate to say, “Where the Democrats think women should have the last word, Trump and many Republicans want to take decisions about abortion out of their hands and force them to pay for it.”

On the ground, political performance runs up against people’s lives and it’s the Republican position of fetal personhood and only the most narrow exceptions to abortion access that reveal themselves to be radical political stances with radical outcomes: There are now millions of people who are living under the anti-abortion laws the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade made possible. I count in that number not just the women forced to face a pregnancy resulting from sexual assault and not just the women who have been prevented from ending a pregnancy that threatens their physical well-being, but both those groups’ loved ones and their communities. Then there are, of course, the women who have a child they would prefer not to have (post-Dobbs, birth rates went up in states with abortion bans by about 2%). Now we must consider adding to that population some of those who wish to turn to IVF procedures to create families.

Nationally, Democrats keep wanting to make All the Arguments for themselves: the “Biden economy,” the specter of “MAGA extremists” and, comically, “no, Biden’s not that old!” But among all possible arguments for Biden, Democrats really need to only make one. Advancing abortion rights, combined with the inarguable truth that Republicans only want to restrict them more, will bring out the young voters whose enthusiasm is wavering and the suburban women who held their noses to vote for Trump last time.

This calculus may seem callous, but the extraordinary number of people damaged by GOP abortion restrictions is the key to a Biden second term. The Biden team seems to recognize this unprecedented if morally unwelcome opportunity; in March, Kamala Harris became the first vice president to do more on the campaign trail than talk about the existence of abortion clinics. She visited one. More than that, she talked about the corporeal circumstances of abortion, mentioning uteruses, fibroids and women miscarrying in toilets. These are the exact terms and vivid images that have been mostly missing from Democratic rhetoric, even as they are an unavoidable part of women’s lives.

This bluntness is in part possible because it’s now unavoidable. There is the growing cohort who have experienced the reality of bodies denied an abortion, of course. Beyond them, news outlets reporting on cases like that of Kate Cox, who had to leave her state of Texas to get an abortion in a life-threatening pregnancy. No one needs to be dainty about the word “abortion” anymore. No one needs to assure voters that they are for “choice” but against “abortion on demand” as Biden did as recently as February.

Via the ballot box, voters keep telling Democrats that this aggressiveness is what they want, though – as could be true in Florida – the electoral victories have come at the expense of having the right to abortion taken away. Marilyn Lands credited her willingness to tell her own unvarnished abortion experience and campaign on the lack of abortion access in Alabama for her special statehouse election victory that flipped the once-safe Republican seat.

That abortion access keeps winning during special elections and off-year contests in red states — prompting unusually high turn-out as well — should tell Democrats just how central and unequivocal their message should be. In Florida, Democrats can and should be especially bold. Abortion will be on the ballot next to Biden. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political victories have come in part because he is able to rouse his voters in ways Democrats have not (running Charlie Crist against him in the last election veers close to malpractice in that regard). The rolling out of the DeSantis-endorsed six-week ban will hurt people. Democrats would not be ghoulish to capitalize on this; indeed, it is a moral imperative that they insist on capitalizing on it.

Since the fall of Roe, voters have championed reproductive access over and over and the Biden campaign has responded with welcome if belated forthrightness. As the Florida Supreme Court hands down two decisions that place access front and center in the most valuable (and barely still swinging) swing state in the country, Democrats’ long-time reluctance to embrace without reservation or exception expansive abortion access – to talk about it frankly and specifically – puts them at risk of losing their once-reliable advantage among female voters and young people, and with it, the presidency.

Donald Trump’s Insatiable Bloodlust

Maureen Dowd

By Maureen Dowd – April 6, 2024

Donald Trump, standing in a suit at a lectern, holds up his hands, with a huge flag in the background.
Credit…Mark Peterson for The New York Times

An earthquake. An eclipse. A bridge collapse. A freak blizzard. A biblical flood. Donald Trump leading in battleground states.

Apocalyptic vibes are stirred by Trump’s violent rhetoric and talk of blood baths.

If he’s not elected, he bellowed in Ohio, there will be a blood bath in the auto industry. At his Michigan rally on Tuesday, he said there would be a blood bath at the border, speaking from a podium with a banner reading, “Stop Biden’s border blood bath.” He has warned that, without him in the Oval, there will be an “Oppenheimer”-like doomsday; we will lose World War III and America will be devastated by “weapons, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.”

“And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump has said.

An unspoken Trump threat is that there will be a blood bath again in Washington, like Jan. 6, if he doesn’t win.

That is why he calls the criminals who stormed the Capitol “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He starts some rallies with a dystopian remix of the national anthem, sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” and his own reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.

In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare uses blood imagery to chart the creation of a tyrant. Those words echo in Washington as Ralph Fiennes stars in a thrilling Simon Godwin production of “MacBeth” for the Shakespeare Theater Company, opening Tuesday.

“The raw power grab that excites Lady Macbeth and incites her husband to regicide feels especially pertinent now, when the dangers of autocracy loom over political discussions,” Peter Marks wrote in The Washington Post about the production with Fiennes and Indira Varma (the lead sand snake in “Game of Thrones.”)

Trump’s raw power grab after his 2020 loss may have failed, but he’s inflaming his base with language straight out of Macbeth’s trip to hell.

“Blood will have blood,” as Macbeth says. One of the witches, the weird sisters, urges him, “Be bloody, bold and resolute.”

Another weird sister, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is predicting end times. “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” she tweeted on Friday. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”

Like Macbeth, Trump crossed a line and won’t turn back. The Irish say, “You may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Macbeth killed his king, then said: “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that since Trump put his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee, prospective employees are asked if they think the election was stolen. Republicans once burbled on about patriotism and defending America. Now denying democracy is a litmus test for employment in the Formerly Grand Old Party.

My Irish immigrant father lived through the cruel “No Irish Need Apply” era. I’m distraught that our mosaic may shatter.

But Trump embraces Hitleresque phrases to stir racial hatred. He has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” Last month, he called migrants “animals,” saying, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”

Trump’s obsession with bloodlines was instilled by his father, the son of a German immigrant. He thinks there is good blood and bad blood, superior blood and inferior blood. Fred Trump taught his son that their family’s success was genetic, reminiscent of Hitler’s creepy faith in eugenics.

“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told PBS. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

Trump has been talking about this as far back as an “Oprah” show in 1988. The “gene believer” brought it up in a 2020 speech in Minnesota denouncing refugees.

“A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” he told the crowd about their pioneer lineage, adding: “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” usurpers don’t ascend to the throne without complicity. Republican enablers do all they can to cozy up to their would-be dictator, even introducing a bill to rename Dulles airport for Trump. Democrats responded by introducing a bill to name a prison in Florida for Trump.

“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?” Greenblatt asked. “Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”

Like Macbeth’s castle, the Trump campaign has, as Lady Macbeth put it, “the smell of blood,” and “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten” it.

Trump’s bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believed

The Guardian

Trump’s bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believed

Rachel Leingang – April 6, 2024

<span>Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, on 16 March, at which he predicted there would be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election.</span><span>Photograph: Kamil Krzaczyński/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, on 16 March, at which he predicted there would be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election. Photograph: Kamil Krzaczyński/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s speeches on the 2024 campaign trail so far have been focused on a laundry list of complaints, largely personal, and an increasingly menacing tone.

He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.

Related: Polls show Trump winning key swing states. That’s partly a failure of the press | Margaret Sullivan

Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.

Journalists rightly chose not to broadcast Trump’s entire speeches after 2016, believing that the free coverage helped boost the former president and spread lies unchecked. But now there’s the possibility that stories about his speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are – making the case that, this time around, people should hear the full speeches to understand how Trump would govern again.

Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.

Curiously, Trump tucks the most tangible policy implications in at the end. His speeches often finish with a rundown of what his second term in office could bring, in a meditation-like recitation the New York Times recently compared to a sermon. Since these policies could become reality, here’s a few of those ideas:

  • Instituting the death penalty for drug dealers.
  • Creating the “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act”: “If China or any other country makes us pay 100% or 200% tariff, which they do, we will make them pay a reciprocal tariff of 100% or 200%. In other words, you screw us and we’ll screw you.”
  • Indemnifying all police officers and law enforcement officials.
  • Rebuilding cities and taking over Washington DC, where, he said in a recent speech, there are “beautiful columns” put together “through force of will” because there were no “Caterpillar tractors” and now those columns have graffiti on them.
  • Issuing an executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.
  • Moving to one-day voting with paper ballots and voter ID.

This conclusion is the most straightforward part of a Trump speech and is typically the extent of what a candidate for office would say on the campaign trail, perhaps with some personal storytelling or mild joking added in.

But it’s also often the shortest part.

Trump’s tangents aren’t new, nor is Trump’s penchant for elevating baseless ideas that most other presidential candidates wouldn’t, like his promotion of injecting bleach during the pandemic.

But in a presidential race among two old men that’s often focused on the age of the one who’s slightly older, these campaign trail antics shed light on Trump’s mental acuity, even if people tend to characterize them differently than Joe Biden’s. While Biden’s gaffes elicit serious scrutiny, as writers in the New Yorker and the New York Times recently noted, we’ve seemingly become inured to Trump’s brand of speaking, either skimming over it or giving him leeway because this has always been his shtick.

Trump, like Biden, has confused names of world leaders (but then claims it’s on purpose). He has also stumbled and slurred his words. But beyond that, Trump’s can take a different turn. Trump has described using an “iron dome” missile defense system as “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.”

These tangents can be part of a tirade, or they can be what one can only describe as complete nonsense.

During this week’s Wisconsin speech, which was more coherent than usual, Trump pulled out a few frequent refrains: comparing himself, incorrectly, to Al Capone, saying he was indicted more than the notorious gangster; making fun of the Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis’s first name (“It’s spelled fanny like your ass, right? Fanny. But when she became DA, she decided to add a little French, a little fancy”).

He made fun of Biden’s golfing game, miming how Biden golfs, perhaps a ding back at Biden for poking Trump about his golf game. Later, he called Biden a “lost soul” and lamented that he gets to sit at the president’s desk. “Can you imagine him sitting at the Resolute Desk? What a great desk,” Trump said.

One muddled addition in Wisconsin involved squatters’ rights, a hot topic related to immigration now: “If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you,” presumably meaning the migrant would be deported instead of the homeowner. He wanted to create a federal taskforce to end squatting, he said.

“Sounds like a little bit of a weird topic but it’s not, it’s a very bad thing,” he said.

These half-cocked remarks aren’t new; they are a feature of who Trump is and how he communicates that to the public, and that’s key to understanding how he is as a leader.

The New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie described it as “something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations”, whereby no one expected him to behave in an orderly fashion or communicate well.

Some of these bizarre asides are best seen in full, like this one about Biden at the beach in Trump’s Georgia response to the State of the Union:

“Somebody said he looks great in a bathing suit, right? And you know, when he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know sand is heavy, they figured three solid ounces per foot, but sand is a little heavy, and he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like – Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that any more, but Cary Grant at 81 or 82, going on 100. This guy, he’s 81, going on 100. Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit, either. And he was pretty good-looking, right?”

Or another Hollywood-related bop, inspired by a rant about Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s romantic relationship:

“It’s a magnificent love story, like Gone With the Wind. You know Gone With the Wind, you’re not allowed to watch it any more. You know that, right? It’s politically incorrect to watch Gone With the Wind. They have a list. What were the greatest movies ever made? Well, Gone With the Wind is usually number one or two or three. And then they have another list you’re not allowed to watch any more, Gone With the Wind. You tell me, is our country screwed up?”

He still claims to have “done more for Black people than any president other than Abraham Lincoln” and also now says he’s being persecuted more than Lincoln and Andrew Jackson:

“All my life you’ve heard of Andrew Jackson, he was actually a great general and a very good president. They say that he was persecuted as president more than anybody else, second was Abraham Lincoln. This is just what they said. This is in the history books. They were brutal, Andrew Jackson’s wife actually died over it.”

You not only see the truly bizarre nature of his speeches when viewing them in full, but you see the sheer breadth of his menace and animus toward those who disagree with him.

His comments especially toward migrants have grown more dehumanizing. He has said they are “poisoning the blood” of the US – a nod at Great Replacement Theory, the far-right conspiracy that the left is orchestrating migration to replace white people. Trump claimed the people coming in were “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have”. He has repeatedly called migrants “animals”.

“Democrats said please don’t call them ‘animals’. I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals,” he said during a speech in Michigan this week.

“In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said during his March appearance in Ohio. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. “These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it,” he said.

And he has turned more authoritarian in his language, saying he would be a “dictator on day one” but then later said it would only be for a day. He’s called his political enemies “vermin”: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he said in New Hampshire in late 2023.

At a speech in March in Ohio about the US auto industry he claimed there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost, which some interpreted as him claiming there would be violence if he loses the election.

Trump’s campaign said later that he meant the comment to be specific to the auto industry, but now the former president has started saying Biden created a “border bloodbath” and the Republican National Committee created a website to that effect as well.

It’s tempting to find a coherent line of attack in Trump speeches to try to distill the meaning of a rambling story. And it’s sometimes hard to even figure out the full context of what he’s saying, either in text or subtext and perhaps by design, like the “bloodbath” comment or him saying there wouldn’t be another election if he doesn’t win this one.

But it’s only in seeing the full breadth of the 2024 Trump speech that one can truly understand what kind of president he could become if he won the election.

“It’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself,” Susan B Glasser wrote in the New Yorker. “Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times.”

But if you ask Trump himself, these are just examples that Trump is smart, he says.

“The fake news will say, ‘Oh, he goes from subject to subject.’ No, you have to be very smart to do that. You got to be very smart. You know what it is? It’s called spot-checking. You’re thinking about something when you’re talking about something else, and then you get back to the original. And they go, ‘Holy shit. Did you see what he did?’ It’s called intelligence.”

I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You

The New Yorker – Letter from Biden’s Washington

I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You

The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024.

By Susan B. Glasser – March 14, 2024

Former U.S. President Donald Trump gives a speech in Rome Georgia in March 2024. Trump is photographed from above and is...

I’m sure you had better things to do on Saturday evening than watch Donald Trump rant for nearly two hours to an audience of cheering fans in Rome, Georgia. His speech was rambling, unhinged, vituperative, and oh-so-revealing. In his first rally since effectively clinching the Republican Presidential nomination, Trump made what amounted to his response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. It’s hard to imagine a better or more pointed contrast with the vision that, two days earlier, the President had laid out for America.

And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.

This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.

Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.

Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”

Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.

And yet there was the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, writing this week in the Wall Street Journal that it was Biden who had “lowered himself with shortsighted and counterproductive blows” in his State of the Union speech. Trump’s entire campaign is a study in grotesque slander, but Rove did not even mention Trump’s Georgia rally while sanctimoniously tut-tutting about Biden. And I don’t mean to single out Rove; it was hard to find any right-leaning commentators who did otherwise. This many years into the Trump phenomenon, they’ve figured out that the best way to deal with Trump’s excesses is simply to pretend they do not exist.

Hanging over both speeches was the increasingly burning question of performance, as the country is now forced to choose between two aging leaders aspiring to remain in the White House well into their eighties. Trump has arguably lowered the bar for Biden, with his constant insults aimed at the President’s age and capacity, and Biden managed to clear it, turning his State of the Union into an affirmation—for fretting Democratic partisans, at least—that he has the vigor and fight to keep going in the job.

Trump’s appearance in Georgia, by contrast, reflected a man not rooted in any kind of reality, one who struggled to remember his words and who was, by any definition, incoherent, disconnected, and frequently malicious. (This video compilation, circulating on social media, nails it.) In one lengthy detour, he complained about Biden once being photographed on a beach in his bathing suit. Which led him to Cary Grant, which led him to Michael Jackson, which led him back to the point that even Cary Grant wouldn’t have looked good in a bathing suit at age eighty-one. In another aside, he bragged about how much “women love me,” citing as proof the “suburban housewives from North Carolina” who travel to his rallies around the country. He concluded that portion of his speech by saying:

But it was an amazing phenomenon and I do protect women. Look, they talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well—you know, the polls are all rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it. Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.

Makes perfect sense, right?

It was no surprise, of course, that Trump began his speech by panning Biden’s: “the worst President in history, making the worst State of the Union speech in history,” an “angry, dark, hate-filled rant” that was “the most divisive, partisan, radical, and extreme” such address ever given. As always, what really stuns is Trump’s lack of self-awareness. Remember his “American carnage” address? Well, never mind. Get past the unintended irony, though, and what’s striking is how much of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform is being built on an edifice of lies, and not just the old, familiar lies about the “rigged election” which have figured prominently in every speech Trump has made since his defeat four years ago.

Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”

Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating into the political lexicon. Consider their latest cause célèbre, the tragic recent death of a young woman, Laken Riley, in which the accused is an undocumented migrant. Trump explicitly blamed Biden and his “crime-against-humanity” border policies for her death. “Laken Riley would be alive today,” he said, “if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country.” Against such treachery, Trump offers a simple, apocalyptic choice: doomsday if Biden is reëlected, or liberation from “these tyrants and villains once and for all.” Wars will be ended at the mere thought of Trump retaking power; crime will cease; arrests will be made; dissenters will be silenced.

I recognize that a speech such as the one that Trump delivered the other night is hard to distill into the essence required of a news story. His detours on Saturday included complaints about Jeff Zucker, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martha Stewart, Megyn Kelly, “the big plagiarizer from Harvard,” Ron “DeSanctimonious,” the Washington Post, “Trump-deranged judge” Lewis Kaplan, “the fascist and racist attorney general of New York State,” “corrupt Fani Willis,” Merrick Garland, and the F.B.I., which, Trump claimed, “offers one million dollars to a writer of fiction about Donald Trump to lie and say it was fact where Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation.” What was he talking about? I don’t know. The man has so many grievances and so many enemies that it is, understandably, hard to keep them straight.

But whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times. The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the “bottomless Pinocchio” was invented.

On Tuesday, days after this performance, Trump and Biden each locked up their respective parties’ nominations. The general election has now begun, and Trump, as of this writing, is the favorite. In the next few months, the Biden campaign and its allies plan to spend close to a billion dollars attempting to persuade Americans not to make the historic mistake of electing Trump twice. My thought is a simpler and definitely cheaper one: watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away. ♦

Trump Is Losing It

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – February 13, 2024

Jamelle Bouie
A group of Trump supporters in Nevada, many wearing red MAGA hats and taking photos, crowds around the former president, who has his right fist raised.
Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It is unclear whether Donald Trump has forgotten the precise nature of NATO or whether he ever fully grasped it in the first place.

What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue about what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish — the kind of outrageous nonsense that flows without interruption from an empty and unreflective mind.

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’” Trump said, recalling an implausible conversation with an unnamed, presumably European head of state. “‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump recounted responding. “‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

The former president’s message was clear: If NATO members do not pay up, then he will leave them to the mercy of a continental aggressor who has already plunged one European country into death, destruction and devastation.

Except NATO isn’t a mafia protection racket. NATO, in case anyone needs to be reminded, is a mutual defense organization, formed by treaty in 1949 as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union hardened into conflict. “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” states Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

According to the terms of an agreement reached last year, member states will work to spend at least 2 percent of national G.D.P. on military investment.

But let’s set this bit of fact-checking aside for a moment and look at the big picture.

It is not just that Trump is ignorant on this and other vital questions; it is that he is incoherent.

Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.

Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.

Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”

There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.

“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said, repeating his false claim that Pelosi was responsible for the failure of Capitol security on Jan. 6.

If you would like, you can also try to make sense of the former president’s recent attempt to describe a missile defense system:

“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A.,” Trump said, before taking an unusual detour. “These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” he continued, gesturing to his arms and his head to emphasize, I guess, that the people responsible for building such systems are capable and intelligent.

“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom,” he added.

I assume Trump is describing the pressure of actually manning a missile defense system. Even so, one would think that a former president — currently vying to be the next president — would at least try to be a little more articulate.

But this gets to one of the oddest things about this election cycle so far. There is no shortage of coverage of President Biden’s age, even if there’s no evidence that his age has been an obstacle to his ability to perform his duties. Indeed, it is plainly true that Biden has been an unusually successful president in areas, like legislative negotiations, that require skill and mental acuity.

Coverage of Biden’s age, in other words, has more to do with the vibes of an “elderly” president — he isn’t as outwardly vigorous and robust as we would like — than it does with any particular issue with his performance.

In contrast to the obsessive coverage of Biden’s age, there is comparatively little coverage of Trump’s obvious deficiencies in that department. If we are going to use public comments as the measure of mental fitness, then the former president is clearly at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately for Biden, Trump benefits from something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because no one expected Trump, in the 2016 election, to speak and behave like a normal candidate, he was held to a lower effective standard than his rivals in both parties. Because no one expected him, during his presidency, to be orderly and responsible, his endless scandals were framed as business as usual. And because no one now expects him to be a responsible political figure with a coherent vision for the country, it’s as if no one blinks an eye when he rants and raves on the campaign trail.

It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue here is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may be unable to do the job at some point in the future; Trump, it seems to me, already is.

One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.

Supreme Court slow to resolve potentially election-altering cases as justices inch toward final arguments

CNN

Supreme Court slow to resolve potentially election-altering cases as justices inch toward final arguments

John Fritze, CNN – April 6, 2024

As the Supreme Court turns toward a series of politically charged disputes in its final arguments later this month, it is wrestling with a backlog of controversies on guns, elections and transgender rights that will thrust its conservative majority into the middle of another turbulent presidential contest.

Up ahead are arguments over whether former President Donald Trump may claim immunity from criminal prosecution on election subversion charges and a roiling fight between President Joe Biden and Idaho over whether hospitals must perform an abortion when the health of a pregnant woman is threatened – the second of two blockbuster abortion cases the court must decide this year.

But as the high court moves toward a busy and fraught final sitting this term, it is also once again slipping behind its past pace, issuing fewer opinions than it did at this same point in its nine-month work period just a few years ago. The court has handed down 11 opinions so far this term – most in relatively obscure matters that were decided unanimously.

The Supreme Court has issued opinions in just 22% of its argued cases this year, compared with 34% through mid-April two years ago and 46% in 2021, according to data compiled by Adam Feldman, founder of Empirical SCOTUS. The share of resolved cases is up slightly over last year – a historic low.

The comparison would improve if new rulings land next week.

Taken together, the numbers point to a term in which the court’s decisions could be scrunched into a shorter time fame – potentially giving the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority an opportunity to reshape the political debate around culture war issues just as Americans begin tuning into the Biden-Trump rematch for president.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, said it had become a “clear trend” in recent years that the court is “very slow” releasing decisions. Though there are many theories about why that may be, the court’s opaque-by-design practice of negotiation and opinion crafting makes it difficult to say with certainty.

A large share of the court’s docket touches on “enormously significant and difficult issues,” Chemerinsky told CNN. “It also is a court that has deep divisions. I assume that all of this leads to delays in releasing decisions.”

Writing a majority opinion is only part of the behind-the-scenes process: Sometimes delays are caused by the concurrences and dissents other justices write. More fractured decisions, in other words, can generate separate opinions and take longer.

The slower pace could prove particularly meaningful this year because of Trump’s assertion of immunity from special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion charges. Trump asked the justices to block a lower court ruling that flatly rejected those immunity claims. The high court agreed to hear the case in late February, but did not set arguments until the end of this month.

The case has put the Supreme Court on the clock and opened it up to criticism that delay will play into Trump’s broader legal strategy of pushing off his pending criminal trials until after the November election. Unless the court speeds up its work, it’s difficult to see how the Trump immunity decision would arrive before the end of June.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor stand on the House floor ahead of the annual State of the Union address by U.S. President Joe Biden. - Shawn Thew/Pool/Getty Images
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor stand on the House floor ahead of the annual State of the Union address by U.S. President Joe Biden. – Shawn Thew/Pool/Getty Images
Trump redefines Supreme Court’s docket

The court heard oral arguments in mid-October over South Carolina’s new congressional map, which a lower court found was a racial gerrymander that violated the Constitution. Both the GOP state lawmakers defending the map and the parties challenging it had asked the Supreme Court to rule by January.

Nearly six months after the court signaled during arguments that it was prepared to uphold the map, it has issued no opinion.

Noting that deadlines for this year’s election were nearing, the state lawmakers filed an emergency appeal last month, asking for permission to use the disputed map while the justices continued their deliberations. Ultimately, a lower court stepped in to allow the state to use the map for now, lamenting that “the ideal must bend to the practical.”

In early November, the court heard arguments over a federal law that bars people who are the subject of domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns. Days earlier it heard a First Amendment appeal from a political activist who wants to trademark the suggestive phrase “Trump Too Small” for use on T-shirts.

On the court’s emergency docket, meanwhile, where cases are decided more quickly and without oral argument, the justices have been sitting for weeks on a request from Idaho officials to enforce a strict statewide ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Initially filed in mid-February, the request has been fully briefed since early March.

The go-slow approach is not a new phenomena this year. The pace of opinions fell sharply last year, according to Feldman’s data, which led to speculation that the shocking leak of the court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade months earlier gummed up the court’s internal works.

Several justices indicated the leak damaged trust, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who described the unprecedented breach as “kind of an infidelity.”

Last year, Justice Brett Kavanaugh downplayed the slower pace by noting many of the court’s biggest cases – which usually are not settled until June – were heard at the start of the term. For instance, the court heard arguments early on that year in a major challenge to the consideration of race in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The Supreme Court ultimately barred consideration of race in June.

This year, some of the biggest cases have been more spread out. On the other hand, the court has been pummeled by a series of divisive emergency appeals. It also has agreed to take on several high-profile matters involving Trump.

In one, the court ruled that Trump would remain on Colorado’s presidential ballot despite claims he violated the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban” because of his actions leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The court was unanimous on the bottom line conclusion but splintered over its reasoning.

In another, the justices agreed to hear arguments April 25 about Trump’s immunity claims.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday, April 2. - Paul Sancya/AP
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday, April 2. – Paul Sancya/AP

The Supreme Court will also hear arguments later this month over a federal law the Biden administration says requires hospitals to provide an abortion if the health of the mother is in danger, even in states such as Idaho that have approved strict abortion bans. The rise of state abortion restrictions following the court’s overturning of Roe has become an election-year cudgel for Biden and congressional Democrats.

Also this month, the court will take up the question of whether a federal obstruction law can be used to prosecute some of the rioters involved in the Capitol attack. The decision could also affect Trump, who has also been charged with that crime.

‘Something has to give’ on Supreme Court docket

The court also dealt with a divisive and ongoing dispute over a Texas immigration law that allowed law enforcement in the state to arrest and detain people it suspects entered the country illegally. Over a public dissent from the three liberal justices, the court cleared the way for Texas to enforce that law last month.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the enforcement hours later and the appeals court heard arguments over the law Wednesday.

The emergency cases, which have drawn increased criticism in recent years, take time away from consideration of the court’s regular docket.

“The court only has so many resources,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “Something has to give, and the court really ought to be thinking through ways to avoid putting itself in this position every year.”

In an aerial view, Texas National Guard soldiers load excess concertina wire onto a trailer at Shelby Park on January 26, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. - Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images
In an aerial view, Texas National Guard soldiers load excess concertina wire onto a trailer at Shelby Park on January 26, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. – Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images

At the same time, the Supreme Court has always moved at its own pace and the justices have little incentive to worry about timing. By its own standards, the court moved unusually quickly to resolve the Trump ballot dispute this year – handing down a decision two months after the former president filed his appeal.

That kind of speed is the exception.

“If you look systematically over time, they’re becoming slower and they’re taking fewer cases,” Feldman said.

But other than stirring speculation among court watchers, he said, the pace of opinions doesn’t have much practical impact. Taking an extra few weeks to finish an opinion, Feldman said, simply means the justices get more time to write.

“It makes sense to me from their perspective that they might want to be slower,” Feldman said. “For efficiency, it probably makes sense to hold off as much as they can until the end of the term.”

Trump’s Second-Term Blueprint Would Take A Wrecking Ball To Public Lands

HuffPost

Trump’s Second-Term Blueprint Would Take A Wrecking Ball To Public Lands

Chris D’Angelo – April 6, 2024

When it was time to outline their vision for managing America’s federal lands under a future Republican presidency, pro-Donald Trump conservatives turned to a man who has spent his career advocating for those very lands to be pawned off to states and private interests.

William Perry Pendley, who served illegally as Trump’s acting director of the Bureau of Land Management for more than a year, authored the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025, a sweeping policy blueprint that the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other right-wing organizations compiled to guide Trump and his team should he win in November. 

The 920-page, pro-Trump manifesto, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” aims to dismantle the federal government, ridding it of tens of thousands of public servants and replacing them with “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One” of a Republican administration. 

Pendley’s dream for the more than 500 million acres of federal land that the Interior Department manages is to effectively turn them into a playground for extractive industries — the same interests he’s spent most of his career representing in court.

In fact, when it came to the chapter’s section on energy production across the federal estate, Pendley simply let Kathleen Sgamma ― the president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade association ― and two industry allies write it for him.

Poll after poll confirms that public support for protecting America’s public lands is broad and bipartisan. Still, the most recent Republican Party platform, adopted in 2016, calls for transferring control of federal lands to the states. In recent years, Republicans have largely abandoned brazen public calls for the outright sale and transfer of federal lands, instead focusing on gutting environmental protections and finding savvier ways to give states more of a say in how public lands are managed.

That shift is reflected in Project 2025. Rather than calling for pawning off federal lands, as he has done throughout his career, Pendley writes that “states are better resource managers than the federal government,” and argues that a new administration should “draw on the enormous expertise of state agency personnel” and “look for opportunities to broaden state-federal and tribal-federal cooperative agreements.”

“It says a lot about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, that they chose someone as far outside of the mainstream as William Perry Pendley to lead the recommendations for our public lands,” said Dan Hartinger, senior director of policy advocacy at the Wilderness Society Action Fund. “And it says a lot about Mr. Pendley’s view of public lands that the first thing he did was hand the pen to the oil and gas industry to write those recommendations.”

William Perry Pendley, the Trump-era acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, speaks during an event in Idaho in 2020.
William Perry Pendley, the Trump-era acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, speaks during an event in Idaho in 2020. Keith Ridler via Associated Press

In his 22-page contribution to the project, Pendley writes of an Interior Department that he says has lost its way and grown beholden to “radical” environmentalists, and that is now “abusing” U.S. laws to “advance a radical climate agenda.”

He condemns what he describes as the Biden administration’s “war” on fossil fuels, ignoring the fact that U.S. production of crude oil and exports of natural gas have continued to soar during Biden’s tenure. And he calls for the restoration of so-called Trump-era “energy dominance” — a catchphrase that is rooted in myth — and the annihilation of numerous environmental safeguards. 

“No other initiative is as important for the DOI under a conservative President than the restoration of the department’s historic role managing the nation’s vast storehouse of hydrocarbons,” Pendley writes. 

Pendley’s blueprint for Trump, if he should win in November, includes holding robust oil and gas lease sales on- and offshore, boosting drilling across northern Alaska, slashing the royalties that fossil fuel companies pay to drill on federal lands, expediting oil and gas permitting, and rescinding Biden-era rules aimed at protecting endangered species and limiting methane pollution from oil and gas operations.

“Biden’s DOI is hoarding supplies of energy and keeping them from Americans whose lives could be improved with cheaper and more abundant energy while making the economy stronger and providing job opportunities for Americans,” reads a section titled ”Restoring American Energy Dominance.” “DOI is a bad manager of the public trust and has operated lawlessly in defiance of congressional statute and federal court orders.”

If that reads like a fossil fuel industry wish list, it’s because it is. Rather than personally calling for the keys to America’s public lands to be turned over to America’s fossil fuel sector, Pendley let the head of a powerful industry group do it for him. An author’s note at the end of his policy directive discloses that the entire energy section was authored by Sgamma, as well as Dan Kish, senior vice president of policy at the American Energy Alliance, and Katie Tubb, a former senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Sgamma’s trade and lobbying organization, Western Energy Alliance, represents 200 oil and gas companies. The American Energy Alliance and the Heritage Foundation both have deepties to the fossil fuel industry. 

“I guess it’s refreshing that they are being so transparent that the oil and gas industry is literally writing the transition playbook for them,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director at the Colorado-based conservation group Center for Western Priorities. “Saying the quiet part out loud — thank you for that.”

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry trade and lobbying group, is a fierce critic of President Joe Biden's energy and environmental policies.
Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry trade and lobbying group, is a fierce critic of President Joe Biden’s energy and environmental policies. Mariam Zuhaib via Associated Press

In his author’s note, Pendley also writes that he “received thoughtful, knowledgeable, and swift assistance” from several other Trump-era Interior officials. Those include Aurelia Giacometto, the Trump-era director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and a former Monsanto executive; Casey Hammond, who served as Interior’s principal deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals; and Tara Sweeney, the former assistant secretary of Indian Affairs who now works for oil giant ConocoPhillips. 

Other contributors to Project 2025 include Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory (R), a leader of the pro-land transfer movement, and Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, a fringe, right-wing organization that championed a disinformation campaign against Biden’s conservation goals. The American Legislative Exchange Council and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, two corporate-backed think tanks that advocate handing over control of federal lands to states, are members of the Project 2025 advisory board.

“Beyond posing an existential threat to democracy, Project 2025 puts special interests over everyday Americans,” said Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group that shared its research on Project 2025 with HuffPost. “The dangerous initiative has handed off its policy proposals to the same industry players who have dumped millions into the project — and who will massively benefit from its industry-friendly policies.”

Accountable found that the Koch network, led by billionaire oil tycoon Charles Koch, funneled over $4.4 million to organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board in 2022.

The Heritage Foundation and Pendley did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.

Pendley’s contribution to Project 2025 is his latest act in a five-decade crusade against the federal government and environmental protections. His first stint at the Interior Department was under James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s Interior chief, who is widely considered one of the most anti-environment Cabinet appointees in U.S. history. The Washington Post once described Pendley as “Watt’s ideological twin.”

Pendley calls himself a “sagebrush rebel,” a reference to the Sagebrush Rebellion movement of the 1970s and ’80s that sought to remove lands from federal control. For decades, he led the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a right-wing nonprofit that has pushed for the government to sell off millions of federal acres. In a 2016 op-ed published by National Review, Pendley wrote that the “Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”

Pendley has compared environmentalists to communists and Nazis, immigrants to “cancer,” and the climate crisis to a “unicorn.” He has said the Endangered Species Act has been used as a tool to “drive people off the land” and into cities where they can be “controlled,” and seemingly voiced support for killing imperiled species discovered on private land. Some of his most extreme anti-environmental screeds were published in 21st Century Science & Technology, a fringe magazine of the late cult leader, convicted fraudster and conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, as HuffPost previously reported.

Asked about some of his radical views during a conference in 2019, Pendley said that his “personal opinions are irrelevant” to the job of overseeing 245 million acres of public land as the head of the BLM. 

But those views are no doubt the reason he was tapped to write the Interior playbook for a future Republican president, particularly one that falsely casts Biden as the enemy of the fossil fuel industry.

“At the end of the day, they know that the land disposal position is deeply unpopular and a nonstarter across any Western state, no matter how conservative,” Weiss said. “That just leaves them with this false narrative about Biden’s war on oil and gas. That’s also a lie, of course, but it’s one they have to keep telling because otherwise there is no way to justify what is in this Project 2025 agenda.”

President Donald Trump signs the hat of Bruce Adams, chairman of the San Juan County Commission, on Dec. 4, 2017, after signing a proclamation to shrink the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City. President Joe Biden has since restored the boundaries of the monuments.
President Donald Trump signs the hat of Bruce Adams, chairman of the San Juan County Commission, on Dec. 4, 2017, after signing a proclamation to shrink the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City. President Joe Biden has since restored the boundaries of the monuments. Rick Bowmer via Associated PressMore

Along with a series of actions to boost drilling and mining across the federal estate, Pendley calls for a future Republican administration to not only dismantle existing protected landscapes but limit presidents’ ability to protect others in the future. He advocates for vacating Biden’s executive order establishing a goal of conserving 30% of federal lands and waters by 2030; rescinding the Biden administration’s drilling and mining moratoriums in Colorado, New Mexico and Minnesota; reviewing all Biden-era resource management plans, which cover millions of acres of federal lands; and repealing the Antiquities Act, the landmark 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to designate 161 national monuments.

“Donald Trump is an unapologetic climate denier who called climate change a ‘hoax’ and slashed environmental protections while he was in office,” Biden campaign senior spokesperson Sarafina Chitika told HuffPost in a statement. “Now, Trump and his extreme allies are campaigning to go even further if he wins a second term by gutting the Inflation Reduction Act and clean energy programs, shredding regulations for greenhouse gas pollution, and serving the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our families and our future.”

The Trump administration positioned itself as an opponent of selling or transferring federal lands, but on several occasions, it proposed public land sell-offs, hosted anti-federal land zealots and installed fierce critics of federal land management in powerful government positions. It also weakened protections for millions of acres of federal land and famously shrank the size of two sweeping national monuments in Utah — the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history.

Pendley argues Trump didn’t go far enough with his attack on national monuments, and that protected sites in Maine and Oregon should have also been on the chopping block.

“The new Administration’s review will permit a fresh look at past monument decrees and new ones by President Biden,” he writes in Project 2025. 

Weiss views Pendley’s antipathy for the Antiquities Act as an acknowledgement of how successful the law has been in protecting public lands. And he says it speaks volumes that Project 2025 organizers tapped Pendley for the job of crafting the Interior blueprint.

“They could have found any number of mainstream conservatives to write their agenda for them. They didn’t,” Weiss said. “They picked the notorious anti-public lands extremist, because that is at the end of the day what they want. They don’t want someone who is going to come in and follow the last 50 years of legal precedent.”

‘Building an authoritarian axis’: the Trump ‘envoy’ courting the global far right

The Guardian

‘Building an authoritarian axis’: the Trump ‘envoy’ courting the global far right

Richard Grenell’s shadow foreign policy campaign is unsettling diplomats and threatens to collapse US interests.

Robert Tait – April 5, 2024

For Donald Trump, he is “my envoy”, the man apparently anointed as the former US president’s roving ambassador while he plots a return to the White House.

To critics, he is seen as “an online pest” and “a national disgrace” – and most importantly, the dark embodiment of what foreign policy in a second Trump administration would look like.

a screen displays the share price for the Trump Media and Technology Group

Meet Richard Grenell, vocal tribune of Trump’s America First credo on the international stage and the man hotly tipped to become secretary of state if the presumed Republican nominee beats Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.

A senior executive in the rightwing Newsmax cable channel, Grenell, 57, has crafted a persona as the archetypal Trump man, keen and ever-ready to troll liberals, allies and foreign statesmen in public forums and social media.

Grenell – who served as a rambunctious ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term – has carved a niche as the articulator-in-chief of a Maga approach to global affairs that appears to echo his political master’s voice.

Seasoned analysts fear his hyperactivity is already unsettling US diplomats even while Trump is out of office.

In recent months, he has pitched up in Guatemala, where he tried to stymie US state department pleas for a peaceful transition of power by backing rightwing efforts to block the inauguration of the liberal president-elect, Bernardo Arévalo, on supposed electoral fraud grounds about a poll previously declared “free and fair” by international observers.

Arévalo subsequently took office, but not before Grenell lambasted American diplomats for “trying to intimidate conservatives” over “a phony concern about democracy”.

He has also repeatedly visited the Balkans – building on a previous role as the Trump administration’s special envoy to the region and working on property deals in Serbia and Albania with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

He attempted to broker a meeting between Trump and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at last year’s United Nations general assembly in New York at a time when the Turkish leader was blocking Sweden’s bid to join Nato, although the proposal was subsequently rejected amid security concerns.

Grenell knows who can be seduced, intimidated and destroyed

Fulton Armstrong

Grenell’s high profile has an intimidating effect on serving US diplomats, according to Fulton Armstrong, senior fellow at American University’s Centre for Latin American Studies.

“Grenell’s very cunning and effective. Having penetrated both the intelligence and the policy world, he knows who can be seduced, intimidated and destroyed,” Armstrong, a former senior analyst at the CIA, told the Guardian.

“The state department eventually did the right thing in Guatemala but only after a lot of dawdling and this tells Grenell that it has issues of commitment and allegiance [that he can exploit].

“Weak people at the state department are scared to piss off the right wing because they want to be ambassadors and fear for their careers, which makes them vulnerable. Someone like Grenell knows how this can be used for issues favoring Trump.”

For his part, Grenell has accused the state department of “playing politics” and “pushing leftwing ideas” in Latin America.

Addressing the influential CPAC gathering of conservatives in February, he said US foreign policy cried out for an “SOB diplomat”, a role he apparently envisions for himself.

“What we need right now is diplomacy with muscle,” Grenell told an online video debate last summer on the Balkans hosted by the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute. “We need to stop mocking tough diplomats. What we’ve seen with Ukraine is that when diplomats fail, we have war and conflict.”

There are many aspects to what Grenell is doing. One is grift …

Joe Cirincione

Grenell has become a strident advocate of abandoning negotiations in decades-old territorial disputes in the Middle East and the Balkans in favor of trade and economic agreements that he hails as sidestepping political problems through creating jobs.

“The success that Donald Trump had was that he avoided politics and concentrated on the economy,” he told CPAC. “Young people leave the region because they don’t have help and they don’t have a job. So part of our foreign policy, if we want to solve problems, is to avoid the political talk and figure out ways to do greater trade.”

For detractors, such talk is code for a transactional foreign policy tailored to Trump’s personal and business interests at the expense of America’s traditional democratic alliances – as well as a signal that Ukraine would be pressured to surrender territory to end its war with Russia.

“There are many aspects to what Grenell is doing,” said Joe Cirincione, a veteran Washington foreign policy and arms control specialist. “One is grift, looking for business deals, particularly in Serbia, where Trump has longstanding business interests and Trump seems to be helping him pursue this.

“Another is more sinister. It looks as though Grenell is trying to build up a developing authoritarian network of rightwing leaders to form this authoritarian axis that Trump might govern by – ranging from Putin to [Viktor] Orbán [prime minister of Hungary] to Erdoğan.

“All these are anti-democratic forces and use the simple playbook of using democracy to overthrow democracy.”

Grenell’s own pronouncements give proponents of America’s existing alliances little cause for comfort.

A relentless critic of Germany’s financial contributions to Nato, he trolled Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, when he attended Biden’s State of the Union address in January to mark his country’s accession to Nato, a move Grenell had opposed, purportedly on the grounds that it would not pay its way.

“The leader of Sweden, who currently isn’t paying his fair share of Nato obligations but has promised to do it later, is leaping to his feet to applaud Joe Biden and the far Left spending policies Biden wants to enact,” Grenell posted on X.

All these are anti-democratic forces and use the simple playbook of using democracy to overthrow democracy

Joe Cirincione

The comment echoed Grenell’s crockery-breaking spell as ambassador to Berlin, where he infuriated his hosts on arrival by demanding that they renew sanctions on Iran after Trump withdrew the US from the nuclear deal agreed by Barack Obama’s administration – even though Germany still adhered to the agreement.

He also ruffled German feathers by telling Breitbart that part of his ambassadorial role was “to empower other conservatives throughout Europe”, a comment seen by some as a tacit olive branch to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party.

For figures like Cirincione, such rhetoric is a harbinger of worse to come.

“If Trump were president and Grenell secretary of state, it would set back American interests by decades, collapse the development of the democratic west and assist the rise of the global right wing, no questions about it,” he said.

Solar eclipse triggers onslaught of conspiracy theories across social media

Yahoo! News

Solar eclipse triggers onslaught of conspiracy theories across social media

Alex Jones, eclipse paths and power grids — debunking the most popular conspiracy theories ahead of Monday’s eclipse.

Katie Mather, Internet Culture Reporter – April 5, 2024

@holikela via TikTok, Alex Jones via Getty Images, @metacowboy via TikTok
@holikela via TikTok, Alex Jones via Getty Images, @metacowboy via TikTok (@metacowboy via TikTok, Alex Jones via Getty Images, @holikela via TikTok)

Depending on who you ask, April 8 could go one of two ways. It will either be when a total solar eclipse happens, putting on a show for the roughly 44 million people who live within the eclipse’s path, or it will be the end of the world.

During a total solar eclipse, some places on Earth are entirely shielded from the sun by the moon for a few minutes. In North America, the eclipse will start on the Pacific coast of Mexico and travel a diagonal path northeast across the U.S. before leaving the continent shortly before 4 p.m. ET. The U.S. won’t see another total eclipse for the next 20 years.

While most people seem excited — many even traveling to other states to witness the eclipse firsthand — others are spreading misinformation about the event. Some prominent social media users, like InfoWars host Alex Jones, have spent the last few weeks spreading conspiracy theories about the eclipse on X, which have reached millions of people.

“Part of what makes conspiracy theories so compelling is their flexibility and malleability,” Yotam Ophir, an expert on media effects, persuasion and misinformation at the University at Buffalo, told Yahoo News. “Those who understand the world through conspiratorial lenses tend to interpret events, especially dramatic ones, as being driven by intentional, often evil, forces.”

Ophir argues that a large component of why conspiracy theories spread and stick is that they’re based in emotions; conspiracy theorists are usually scared or angry. Jeffrey Blevins, a professor of journalism at the University of Cincinnati, noted that the emotional ties to these beliefs also explain why conspiracy theorists don’t seek out any information that could contradict or negate their existing views.

A sign on I-81 in New York highlights the solar eclipse happening
A sign on I-81 in New York highlights the solar eclipse happening on Monday. (Ted Shaffrey/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

“People want to win an argument, make a point or simply seek validation that their beliefs are right,” Blevins told Yahoo News. “If there’s a pithy meme or some kind of content that they can share on social media that is going to reinforce their belief — they want to share it with others.”

The foundation of conspiracy theories is an “us versus them” mentality, Ophir said.

“Those who share conspiracy theories often feel socially rewarded for doing so — they happen to know something secret that nobody else understands, which makes them special and in the knowing,” he explained.

Let’s break down some of the common conspiracy theories around the April 8 solar eclipse.

No, the Earth is not flat

The Flat Earther mentality believes that the Earth is shaped like a disk and the sun and the moon rotate around each over above the Earth’s surface (the Earth itself does not rotate). It is a pseudoscientific conspiracy theory that does not address the overwhelming scientific evidence that proves the Earth is round.

During the last solar eclipse in 2017, Mic interviewed multiple self-identified Flat Earthers who claimed the eclipse’s path and the moon’s shadow size indicated that the planet is flat and not rotating — despite scientists’ explanations.

“If someone believes something to be true (e.g., flat Earth), they are more likely to search out content that supports their preexisting view, rather than any evidence to the contrary,” Blevins explained.

Similar theories have popped up online ahead of April 8.

No, the eclipse is not passing over 8 towns called Nineveh

A popular theory is that the solar eclipse will pass over several towns named Nineveh in the U.S. and Canada. Depending on the post, some have said it’s six towns, others say it’s seven or eight.

People claim it’s notable because Nineveh is also the name of a town that the biblical figure Jonah, a Hebrew prophet, visited, and some double down to suggest that an eclipse happened during the biblical visit too. Thus, some social media users are suggesting this is a sign from God.

“Conspiracy theorists often see the world in Manichean ways, meaning they see the world as composed of purely good people who are in a never-ending war against evil forces,” Ophir said. “These ideas are very Biblical in nature and are strongly embedded in Christianity and other religions.”

In reality, two towns named Nineveh are in the path of totality — one in Ohio and one in Indiana.

No, it is not significant that 2024’s eclipse path will cross over 2017’s eclipse path

A TikTok with over 10 million views suggests that we should be suspicious that April 8’s eclipse path crosses the U.S. in the opposite direction of the 2017 eclipse — making a big “X” over the U.S. The TikToker claims, “This has never happened in the United States. We have never had two solar eclipse paths cross over one town.”

While yes, the paths will cross, it’s not anything more than that. Eclipse paths have and will continue to cross paths frequently because they move in curving arcs across the Earth.

People watch the solar eclipse in August 2017
People watch the solar eclipse in August 2017. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters) (REUTERS / Reuters)
No, the eclipse will not cause the collapse of power grids and communication systems across the U.S.

Towns expecting an influx of tourists who want to see the eclipse are expecting cell service disruptions because there will be significantly more people than usual in the area.

The New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES) said that state and local government officials have been working with major cell service providers to prepare for the surge in cellular bandwidth that’s expected when tourists visit for the eclipse. DHSES also reiterated that emergency responders use special radio channels and bandwidth to accommodate 911 calls.

Yes, some towns in the eclipse path have declared a state of emergency. No, it’s not because the eclipse is an indication that the world is ending.

States of emergency have been declared in response to the massive crowds that are expected to pour into towns and cities on April 8. Some towns, like Riverside, Ohio, expect the population to double temporarily for the eclipse. States like Ohio haven’t been part of an eclipse path for over 200 years and won’t experience the next one until 2099 — meaning it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event for residents.

“Conspiracy theorists distrust governments and other reliable sources of information,” Ophir said. “They believe that there must be a more nefarious explanation to the emergency preparedness.”

Declaring a state of emergency helps these areas prepare in case of an actual emergency. Plans will be put in place, hospitals will be ready, police and security will be beefed up and methods for any operational communications will already be set up.